WARSAW (June 23, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, today announced that Poland’s Armament Agency has signed a contract for the acquisition of  V-BAT  vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) intended to support Polish Navy operations.   The V-BAT force will be deployed aboard a Polish Navy vessel, providing maritime domain awareness and intelligence, surveillance, and re...

The Lowe Institute published another of their excellent annual reports on Australian public sentiment. The polling results are unsurprising: Cactus spines are produced from specialized structures called areoles, a kind of highly reduced branch. Areoles are an identifying feature of cacti. As well as spines, areoles give rise to flowers, which are usually tubular and multipetaled. That’s clearly the wrong article. Let’s try again : Australians are wary of Donald Trump’s Ameri...

I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny Over the last months I have watched more and more people build something on top of coding agents that feels meaningfully different from just using a coding agent. Some of this happens on top of Pi which is cool to see for sure! The pattern is the same everywhere though: work is put into a queue of sorts, a machine picks it up, attempts it, sto...

Much like everyone else who wants to engage as little as possible with "here are some effective threats to make the computer do what you want" while still learning about exciting new computer things, I have been learning how to use Jujutsu . I recently had my epiphany insight where it all clicked and I understood the mental model (which I will not share, because of theory ). Something this has me reflecting on is how "reconcile these two divergent histories" is a surprisingly common operatio...

I’m hosting July’s IWBC and the timing is perfect since I split my reading year into to halves, which means I’m starting with an empty shelf in July. The book I picked is “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm . I read this book now more than 20 years ago, and I remember having a great impact on young me. And so I started wondering what current me would think of it. And the IWBC is a good excuse to pick it up a second time. If you decide to read it and post a review on your blog, m...

When I was a kid, most people did not know how to type. We took typing class. The final exam was a speed test: words per minute. Today, you will not impress anyone by saying you can type. In fact, cursive writing is fading. Kids increasingly cannot read or write it. We type constantly. We forget how many skills are learned, and how often some of these skills have faded. But not everything fades. Socrates would be immensely popular today as a teacher. I still buy and recommend paper books. Is...

The most stubborn facts are those of the spirit, not those of the physical world. — Jean Gottmann, Geography and International Relations In 1914, before the First World War, there was this belief : “a European war would be economically disastrous, the moneyed classes won’t let it happen”. Europe went to war anyways, and the war was in fact an economic disaster as everyone knew it would be. Why were those people wrong? Because the rich were not in control : the Tsar and t...

Old Buildings on the Darro, Granada by David Roberts, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a new housing bill, General Motors joining the grid-scale battery game, skepticism about data center delays, solid-state air conditioning, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: This week IFP p...

Create one of those Uses pages. Still a work in progress, but there's a good chunk of the stuff I use on there now. https://kevquirk.com/uses Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Create one of those Uses pages. Still a work in progress, but there's a good chunk of the stuff I us...

By Zhuoning Yuan , Ta-Ying Cheng , Benjamin Klein , Bahareh Azarnoush Introduction At Netflix, we build technology to help storytellers bring their creative visions to life and to help members discover the stories they love. To connect stories with diverse audiences around the world, we produce promotional assets, including trailers, teasers, and social short‑form videos, that build on and elevate the original footage. Through close collaboration with the teams crafting these assets, we i...

This morning on Hacker News I saw Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance , describing a small but effective inpainting model - a model where you can mark regions of an image to remove and the model imagines what should fill the space. The released model required PyTorch and NVIDIA CUDA , but since it described itself as 0.2B I decided to try and get it running using WebGPU in a browser. TL;DR: I got it working, and you can try the demo at simonw.gith...

For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. According to current estimates, approximately 70% of the stuff that makes up the cosmos consists of dark energy, an unknown force that pushes space to expand. And another 25% consists of dark matter, a mysterious material that holds galaxies together. But semantically speaking, dark energy and dark matter are… Source For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. ...

There’s a new paper out called “PivCo-Huffman” (HTML version with annotations here ) and it’s very interesting. Normal Huffman decoding (and, to a lesser extent, encoding) is inherently quite serial. We can get explicit parallelism by using multiple streams , which scales just fine to moderate numbers of streams – something like 4-8 is usually not an issue. Not very suitable for vectorization or wide vector machines like GPUs, though: every extra stream adds signaling overhead in t...

(All references in this blog post can be found in the main article the post is about which is  here .) Recall that \(R(s,k)  \) is the least \(n\) so that, for all 2-colorings of the edges of \(K_n\), there is either a RED \(s\)-clique or a BLUE \(k\)-clique. \(R(k,k)\) has been well studied and is often called \(R(k)\). However, today we are concerned with \(R(s,k)\) \(s\) is fixed and \(k\) goes to infinity. 1) In 1995 Jeong Han Kim showed \(R(3,k)\) is asy \(\Theta(\frac{k^2}{\log k})\). At...

The other week I was the MC for day 2 of CSS Day conference . It was my first time ever being an MC for a conference! I was so excited and, honestly, very nervous at the start. My hands were shaking a lot, and it's no wonder, as Bruce Lawson had been the MC of the previous day, and that's a tough act to follow. And if I can’t be funny on the spot, I will try to make up for it in other ways . I ended the day with the following: Throughout the day, when introducing our wonderful spea...

SumatraPDF is a Windows GUI application for viewing PDF, ePub and comic books written in C++. Lately I do a lot of my SumatraPDF coding with AI agents: Claude Code, Grok Build, OpenAI Codex. They’re good at writing code. They’re less good at knowing if the code works, especially for GUI apps. The problem: agents don’t drive UI well Say I ask an agent to fix a bug in PDF text search, or in the new feature that translates selected text via an LLM. How does the a...

Cluttered desks build up slowly. One charging lead, one monitor cord, one adapter at a time, until the surface feels harder to use than it should. A tidy work area looks better and feels less stressful day to day. This walkthrough covers practical fixes anyone can apply. A few smart accessories and habits turn tangled cords into calm order. Start With an Empty Cable Management Desk Surface Every solid cable management desk plan begins with a clean slate. Wipe the top so yo...

The seventh episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 7, I chat with Ana , the author of ohhelloana.blog . We talk about, among other things, the growth we see in our websites over time, finding an in-person indie web community, and connecting with people using personal websites. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Ana ohhelloana.blog The seventh episode of Wonders of Web Weavin...

About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network . Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow , but we quickly landed on Off By One with Jeff Atwood – which is funny for so many reasons, but mainly because of this programmer joke: No, I did not come up with this variation on the classic quote , but I wish I had. Well, whatever, here's show number two – free to view for eve...

The lines between transactional systems, analytical systems, hybrid systems, and shared storage architectures are getting blurry. This post proposes a small taxonomy for describing the different ways systems, workloads, storage tiers, visibility, and durable copies relate to each other. OLTP, OLAP, HTAP, and now LTAP? We can think of the first two as two types of workload which have specialized query engines and storage systems to support them. OLTP such as the RDBMS like Postgres and MySQL use ...

Watching the development of AI harnesses is really interesting for a ton of reasons. It is ground zero for agentic development, a large amount of the work is open source, and every major player thinks that they are in a winner takes all race so the enginering teams are large and incredibly talented. Claude Code alone will probably be processing $100bn a month in tokens in the next year so every single choice has large consequences, if they aren't executing better than everyone else they will qui...

The Apollo 14 Lunar Module, with its 7° tilt apparent in the picture. The onboard astronauts looked out the module’s window often to ensure it was not tipping over. Image: NASA / David Harland For NASA to safely land 12 astronauts on the Moon with the Apollo missions , a lot had to go right. But before it could even attempt Apollo, the agency needed to know what our Moon is like up close. Worrying about the basic nature of the lunar surface and soil may sound mundane now but it was a big un...

I ran into the classic “ range over a channel ” leak while working on a custom cron scheduler. I’ve debugged it on prod many times before, but writing one myself in a small piece of code reminded me how easy it is to write bugs like this even when you know about it. Here: on each tick, the scheduler dispatches the jobs that are due each job reports its outcome on a channel one collector ranges over that channel to record the run // leaky-tick/main.go func tick ( due ...